It’s 6:30am on March 5th, 2048. You wake up on this, another workday. The bed kept track of your sleep, recording every movement and carefully monitoring sleep states, breathing, heartbeat and other vitals. Knowing that you have back problems, the bed adjusted its contouring accordingly, targeting just the right muscles. You feel good and well rested. Your bed also coordinated the correct room temperature to make it exactly right for your preference.

Bathroom

You get up and step into the bathroom. The lights turn on automatically, light switches were phased out years ago. Since you’re a bit older, you know that every room still has a small hidden manual light switch within the wall but kids nowadays aren’t even aware of its existence. You turn on the faucet and the temperature is just right though it’s a cold and dreary day in Silicon Valley. You step into the shower, the water is just the right temperature. No need to shampoo or use soap, the shower takes care of everything, you just step in, shower and then experience the pleasant drying mode. Unbelievable that people used hair dryers in the past! Nowadays, human hairdressers are said to offer vintage bespoke haircuts by manually cutting hair. Hair styling and cutting are entirely automated. The shower dries and styles your hair in minutes to that perfect look.

Wardrobe

Back in the bedroom the closet doors quietly slide open after your hand wave. A coordinated outfit is presented. You don’t shop for clothes like you used to - you simply approve suggested outfits and tap to purchase. Coordinated outfits show up in your closet. The system detects old clothes that don’t get used and after your approval, auto recycles. You never see a thing that happens behind the scenes.

Kitchen

Breakfast time! You come downstairs and step into the kitchen. The rooms light up automatically as you pass through the house, it’s still a bit dark. The lit kitchen is suggesting a litany of things you could have for breakfast on the frove door. Frove is an appliance introduced a decade ago. It’s a combination of fridge, stove and oven. Suggested items are personalized based on your age, genetic makeup and health conditions. The kitchen is softly playing bossa nova. It knows you like to start the day on a happy note. With a few taps on a screen of options you make your breakfast choices, you’re not ready to speak yet. If you wish, you can also tell your kitchen what you want. In minutes the kitchen produces a breakfast that drops in from a designated cubby. Grocery shopping no longer exists. With a subscription service everything is shipped directly to your kitchen. You never see any boxes or dispose of trash. Kitchen replenishment is seamless and invisible. It just happens. You think back to old times when you had to waste time grocery shopping. Kids are awake now. They go through their own motions and tumble downstairs into the kitchen.

Advent of another Workday

You’re checking your devices now and see the flurry of early morning work activity. You kiss the kids goodbye as your front door opens. Their self driving car is here to take them to school. Yours is arriving in five minutes to usher you to the office.

I love building technology products because if you look carefully, you can glean pieces of the future. It’s thrilling to push boundaries of what’s possible to create something new.

At Salesforce I built products that transform the way people work. Customers use Salesforce for managing sales process, marketing campaigns and patient records, convenient customer support and multiple other use cases that often surprise even the Salesforce product team. It was a thrill to elevate an amazing platform to the next level with Einstein — the Salesforce AI layer. Customers can automate tedious tasks, get relevant recommendations and predictions and discover the right information at the right time. Eager to explore new AI ideas, I left Salesforce in June.

Before Salesforce we built Parable, a creative photo network. I’m most proud of building Parable because it was an exercise in creativity and scrappiness. Parable design won accolades and in Mid 2015, Parable was bought by Samsung.

This month, I joined Foundation Capital as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Foundation is one of the best VC firms in the world having invested in companies such as Netflix, Lending Club, MobileIron, AdRoll and Chegg.

As an EIR at Foundation I’ll be spending part of my time alongside Joanne Chen and Ashu Garg helping portfolio companies to scale focusing on enterprise AI, consumer mobile, and marketplaces. I’m also exploring new ideas and meeting fantastic people along the way. Stay tuned! I’ll be working from the Foundation Menlo Park office most days. Couple of days each week I’ll be in the San Francisco office.

If you have an enterprise AI, consumer mobile or marketplace startup that you think Foundation should fund — drop me a line at nburina@foundationcap.com.

I was born in Mostar. My early childhood memories are hazy now. Every year the scenes fade. That time and place seem surreal, so far removed from my present reality. The fog thickens every year but some things I remember.

Being loved. Having two parents, a small sister and a supporting entourage of grandmothers, grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins of every conceivable kind; first, second, distant in family line but known and close, cousins in name only through marriage. They were all a part of my world and I loved them all.

There is a well-established tradition in the Balkans of sitting in company, conversing for hours. People take their time in life. Afternoons were synonymous with a Turkish coffee ritual. Visiting friends and relatives would arrive unannounced to sip a thick coffee, sitting around for hours, talking.

On hot summer nights you could hear cicadas and feel the town’s energy. People were out and about, crowding cafes and restaurants or visiting each other’s homes. Evening visits were accompanied by meze and strong regional alcohol: Slivovitz. Raki. I remember thick clouds of cigarette smoke. The card games. Happily playing in the corner. This was our life. Enveloped in a safe familial cocoon.

My grandmother would take me to the villages sometimes. There we picked sticky figs. Once we picked cherries. We would take one from the tree and pry it apart. Some were filled with white worms. There were pomegranates on the tree next to our house. I loved those.

One summer I went to grandmother’s village. They were slaughtering pigs. The village was alive with festivities and numerous cousins. The next summer we went to grandpa’s ancestral village. I hung out with the cool older girl who looked after sheep. Grandmother was scared that I would fall into a cavernous ditch so she carefully monitored my time outside. I found a hammock and vociferously read ten ninja books. I aspired to become one but worried that it was already too late. And how would I find a proper trainer? The ninja training remained a fantasy. Instead, upon my return to town, I was sent to music school. I attended solfeggio classes followed by private piano lessons. At the end of the school year I played a piece in front of a crowd of fellow students and parents.

Daily I roamed the streets of town, alone, at a young age. I always ran into people; friends, parent’s friends, cousins, neighbors, schoolmates. Along the way, I made pit stops at my aunt’s house who spoiled me rotten or at grandmother’s who did the same.

In summers we would pack into our little car and drive to the Adriatic coast, often to Makarska, sometimes Neum or Split. There were two summers when, with grandmothers in tow, we drove to Greece. Thessaloniki was perfect. Herds of goats owned the beaches. Our skin burned easily and we resorted to copious amounts of aloe vera. At night, we heard the song of cicadas mixed with sounds of sea. Salty water crashing into land, lulling us to sleep.